


Sonnet 148

by quarantinefanfiction



Category: Euphoria (TV 2019)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26638327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quarantinefanfiction/pseuds/quarantinefanfiction
Summary: Lexi thinks she's really into Tucker Blake.
Relationships: Rue Bennett/Lexi Howard
Comments: 10
Kudos: 67





	1. Chapter 1

Tucker Blake hasn’t asked her to the Freshman Formal yet, but he stares at her a lot, like so much that it’s starting to border on creepy, but he’s also the only guy she’s ever met who stares at _her_ and not a couple inches ahead of her where Cassie usually is. It’s flattering to be noticed. And she knows he’s going to ask her, and she knows she’s going to say yes because she’s a teenage girl, and he’s a boy, who’s not totally unattractive, choosing her out of the thousand other girls that go to their school.

Rue doesn’t see it the same way.

They’re hanging out at Lexi’s after school, which means Rue’s stretched out on the bed, feet by Lexi’s head and completely zoned out, while Lexi reads “The House on Mango Street” out loud to her. They’re supposed to have it read by the end of the week, and Lexi knows Rue probably hasn’t even signed it out yet, so she doesn’t mind reading it for the both of them.

But today, her thoughts keep drifting to the way Tucker held the door open and smiled at her this morning. When she realizes she’s read the same sentence three times, she puts the polaroid of her and Cassie in between the pages and shuts the book. They’re almost at the end, but if she stops here, Rue will have to come over at least one more time this week.

Lexi sits up, crossing her legs and facing Rue. She's on her back, drowned in her hoodie, with an arm over her eyes. “What do you think about Tucker Blake?”

“Uh, I don’t know. He’s like, a stupider version of Nate Jacobs.”

“That’s kind of rude,” Lexi mumbles, offended on his behalf. “I mean, you’ve never even talked to him.” 

“I don’t have to.” Rue lifts onto her elbows, barely opening her eyes. “He rides the bench at every fucking game and thinks Nate is the coolest guy to walk the Earth. Doesn’t sound very smart to me.”

“Well, I think he’s nice.”

“Why, because he stares at you the exact same way he stares at the cafeteria pizza?” Rue sits up too and rubs at her eye. “It’s fucking weird, Lexi. He looks like he’s gonna try to lock you in a fucking shed or something.” 

Lexi deflates. Of course it’s weird when a guy looks at her but completely normal for a hundred strangers to drool over Cassie.

“I think he’s going to ask me to the Freshman Formal.”

Rue looks at her through her eyelashes long enough for Lexi to start doubting herself, and then just shakes her head and throws her arm over her eyes again.

\---

TuckerBlake01 requests to follow her on Instagram a few days later, and Lexi can’t keep the smile off her face because she was right: he does want her...or at the very least, he wants to get to know her.

She waits until she’s completed her entire math worksheet and double-checked her answers before she accepts.

His feed is public and full of photos at football games and parties and weekend fishing trips. His cheeks are a little blotchy, and when he’s not wearing the hat that’s always backwards on his head, he combs his dark brown curls neatly to the side; it’s endearing, and nothing about it sets off any red flags, so she follows him back.

Her phone buzzes almost instantaneously with a DM.

It’s a smiley face made from a semicolon and a bracket, and maybe the bar is set too low, but Lexi actually blushes.

\---

Rue leaves Lexi on ‘seen’ when she sends her a screenshot of it. 

\---

“I can’t believe he’s taking you out for a fucking milkshake like this is the 50s,” Rue says from where she’s lounging on the couch, watching Lexi try on Cassie’s dresses.

“I think it’s cute.”

\--

In between sending each other endless videos of cats, Lexi and Tucker have been getting to know each other pretty well. She knows things like his favorite color is pink, and he’s very aware that, unless there’s some sort of miracle, he’s not going to be playing football at a collegiate level. He has a goldfish named Golightly; she asks him if that has anything to do with _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ , and he answers with the flushed-face emoji.

She waits for him to ask for nudes or send a dick pic, but he never does.

And then, two days ago, when she was waiting for Rue outside the detention room because Rue had fallen asleep in class for the third time and their English teacher had finally had enough—Tucker came up to her, dressed in his football gear and on his way to practice.

“They make you practice even though you just sit around for the actual games?” Lexi had asked, and then immediately regretted that those were her first real words to him (other than the quick “thank you” she’d mumbled when he’d held the door open for her weeks ago).

Tucker just laughed, pretending to be hurt and putting his hand on his chest. “I guess it wouldn’t be high school without some sort of humiliation.”

It was a little awkward trying to translate whatever chemistry they had over DMs into the real world, but eventually, after smiling at each other shyly for a while, he’d asked her to go out with him after the game on Friday.

And Lexi said yes because maybe he is just a stupider version of Nate Jacobs, but at least that means he’s not smart enough to manipulate her.

\---

“If it _was_ the 50s, I’d be watching from the colored bleachers,” Rue says, frowning. “And you’d be protesting me showing up.”

Lexi’s eyebrows draw together. She watches Rue through the mirror. She looks tired and unfocused, and it’s getting worse every day. Lexi had seen the same thing happen to her dad before he stopped coming around, and then to her mom, and it terrifies her. She’s read every article she could find online, and she knows Rue has to _want_ to get help before she can get better, and selfishly, she’s afraid Rue will stop talking to her if she tries to bring it up.

“I’d like to think we’d still be friends,” Lexi says. “I can’t imagine my life without you in it. In whatever year.”

Rue pushes her hair behind her ears and looks down at her feet. “I don’t think that dress is the right one.”

Lexi frowns at her reflection and sighs. Her chest isn’t big enough to fill it in, and she feels like a kid who’s putting on her mother’s clothes to play dress up. “Maybe I should try the blue one again.”

“Just wear one of your own dresses,” Rue says. “He asked _you_ out; he’s not expecting Cassie to show up.”


	2. Chapter 2

Rue turns up to the football game just before halftime and is completely wasted. She sits down on the bleachers next to Lexi, looks her up and down, and smiles. Lexi decided to just wear one of her darker floral-print dresses under a grey cardigan. “Good choice,” Rue slurs. It’s cold enough that the air clouds around her words. “You look like you.”

Lexi wrinkles her nose at the smell of Vodka on Rue’s breath. “How’d you get here?”

“Fez.”

Even though Fezco is like, the sweetest (and only) drug dealer Lexi’s ever met, the fact that Rue’s taken to hanging out with him every day she isn’t with her makes her uneasy. “Are you leaving with him too?”

“Yeah, probably.” Rue squints down at the field and smirks. “Where’s your boyfriend, Lexi?”

Lexi’s cheeks redden at the mocking tone. “Um…” She scans the lit-up field and then points to the bench where some other guys in football gear, the water boy, the mascot, and the coach are standing. Tucker’s sitting at the end of the bench, switching between being on his phone and occasionally clapping his hands in encouragement.

Rue laughs and then clears her throat. “ ‘Cunning love. With tears thou keep’st me blind, Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should find’.”

“What?”

“It’s Shakespeare,” Rue says, amused at Lexi’s bewildered expression. “ _You’re_ the one who read it to me.”

“I-I know.” Lexi shakes her head and stares at Rue’s mouth like she’s expecting somebody else to crawl out of it and tell her that they were actually the one reciting a sonnet she had read earlier this semester back to her. “I just didn’t think you actually paid attention.” 

“Yeah, well…” Rue shrugs.

The game breaks for halftime, and everyone is up and moving around, trying to use the bathroom and grab some food before their twenty-minutes runs out.

Tucker jogs up the steps towards them.

“Hey,” he says, smiling politely at Rue and then grinning just for Lexi. His cheeks are pink from the cold, and it’s kind of adorable. “I’m really glad you’re here. You look great!”

“Thank you.” Lexi blushes. “You’re killing it on the bench. I’ve never seen anyone do it quite like you.” 

Rue groans quietly beside her. “I’m going to get a coke.”

“They’ll knock a nickel off the price if you tell the guy at the stand I sent you,” Tucker says. Rue ignores him, but he just laughs at his own joke. He rubs his hands together and blows on his fingers. “I’m excited for tonight. I promise this milkshake is going to blow your mind. And it’s not limited to milkshakes either, they’ve got really good 24/7 waffles.”

Coach Bryan directs his megaphone toward the bleachers to yell at Tucker to rejoin the team immediately before Lexi can say anything. Tucker nods, waving a hand like he’ll be there in a second.

“Yeah, I’m not supposed to be up here,” he admits, and something flutters inside Lexi. “But I couldn’t help it, you looked beautiful from where I was sitting.” His eyes flick down to Lexi’s lips, but he just smiles a little and seems to decide he can wait until everything is a little less chaotic around them. “I’ll see you right after the game.”

\---

“Fez’s leaving so I’m’na go too,” Rue says, coming back with a can of coke, and a two-bite cupcake with pink frosting that she hands Lexi. She gives Lexi a hard look and clenches her jaw. “Just uh, you know, don’t do anything you don’t want to do, okay? You need to understand that just because your boyfriend thinks that it's 1950, and men thought that like, women were their fucking property back then—it’s not, and you…you can fucking say no.”

“I know,” Lexi says softly because Rue looks like she’s already about to rage at the world for something that hasn’t and most likely won’t happen. “The diner is public and will probably be really crowded after the game.” 

“Fucking diner,” Rue mumbles to herself and shakes her head. “Just…if you’re not back within 24 hours, I’m going to break down every shed in this fucking suburb to look for you.”

\---

They Uber to a diner just outside of East Highland called _Tiffany’s_. Tucker tells her, aside from the milkshakes being really good, he picked it specifically because Lexi was right about his goldfish. He lets her order first. She gets a vanilla milkshake and waffles with whipped cream and strawberries. Tucker gets a chocolate shake and a chicken waffle sandwich.

He tears into his while Lexi cuts hers into smaller squares and spears a strawberry onto her fork.

“Did you like the game?” He asks, around a mouthful.

“I liked watching you guys celebrate your win,” Lexi says. The Blackhawks had flooded the field, doggy piling onto each other. Tucker had flashed her two-thumbs up. “But I don’t think football's my kind of sport.”

“Well, then I’m really glad you agreed to come watch it anyway.”

“Do you think you’ll ever get on the field?”

“Yeah. I mean, I hope so. I just need a little more practice. Nate wants everyone to be perfect, which means he pushes us really hard, but everything he does is to make the team stronger. I know people have a lot to say about him, but you gotta respect his hustle. The guys going to be a football legend.” He finishes off his sandwich and wipes his fingers on a napkin. “How’s the shake?”

“You were right,” Lexi says, a little distracted by the hero-worshipping. “It’s one of the best milkshakes I’ve had.”

She steers the conversation away from football, and they talk about school, and how they both really love old movies, so he slides to her side of their booth, props his phone against the napkin dispenser and hands her an earbud. They watch _Funny Face_ , and when it’s over, he pays for everything, and holds her hand, swinging it back and forth, while they wait for their Uber.

“You know, I was like a hundred percent sure you’d say no to me.”

“Why?” Lexi laughs a little; she’d been ready to say yes before he’d even asked.

“Because you’re smart,” he says and squeezes her hand. “And I’m not exactly Eisenberg.”

Lexi bites her lip. “I think you mean Einstein.”

“Exactly.”

\---

Tucker asks the driver to wait by the curb in front of Lexi’s house and walks Lexi to the door.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he says, and Lexi doesn’t say no.

He puts his fingers underneath her chin, runs a thumb over her bottom lip and tilts her head up, and Lexi’s heart is beating so hard she can’t really focus on the kiss because it’s her first kiss, and she’s not entirely sure what to do. It’s over before she can process it, just his lips against hers, and then he pulls away and smiles.

Lexi thinks it’s kind of perfect. 

\---

Cassie’s awake when Lexi tiptoes into their room and shuts the door as quietly as she can behind her. Normally, Cassie would leave for school on Friday morning and not come back until Saturday afternoon, but she’s been different ever since she turned fifteen a month ago, noticeably sadder and building herself a reputation by partaking in some decidedly unhealthy coping mechanisms.

“What were you doing with Tucker Blake?”

Lexi closes her eyes. She wishes Cassie were asking her like an excited older sister who’s supposed to be happy that she’d gone on her first date and kissed her first boy, but it’s not a happy question, it’s wary and almost accusing. “We were just hanging out.”

“Did you…”

“No. God, Cassie.”

“You should be careful, Lex. Guys on the football team aren’t nice.”

Lexi laughs and shakes her head. “You would know.” Cassie looks struck, and Lexi immediately feels bad. “Sorry,” she sighs and rubs her eyebrow. “Tucker’s sweet. I wouldn’t have gone out with him if I thought he was just trying to use me like that.”

“Okay,” Cassie says, mutedly. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”


	3. Chapter 3

Lexi’s straddling Tucker’s lap. His hands are under her knit sweater, fingers sliding up to the edge of her bra and down again. His lips move from her neck to her mouth, but when his tongue touches her bottom lip, for some reason, she can’t make herself grant it access. Tucker pulls away, looking up at her, eyebrows drawn in concern and eyes a little hazy with arousal.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Lexi’s face floods with heat, and she gets off of him, sitting back down on the couch. _It Happened One Night_ is paused on the tv, and she keeps her eyes locked on Clark Gable’s face. “We should probably just watch the rest of the movie.”

Tucker sighs. “Okay.”

Aside from _that_ , things have been going really well between them. He wakes up extra early, so they can walk to school together, and even though he never asks her to come to another game, sometimes, she stays late to watch him practice.

They watch movies, and on the weekends, they go to the park to monopolize the swings, and they kiss a lot, but it never becomes anything more than lips because something locks up inside her whenever he tries to make it anything else. It’s not that she doesn’t want him to, but she’s never made out with anyone before, and she can’t ask Cassie about the specifics because Cassie doesn’t like Tucker, and Lexi doesn’t trust the articles online that say it should come naturally.

Sometimes, she can feel Tucker’s bulge through his jeans, and even though he’s never said anything about it yet, she knows it probably isn’t very fun for him.

\---

“Okay, just fucking hear me out, okay? What if Dickinson and ever other fucking poet on the planet just fucking meant what they wrote, and it was everybody that read it afterward that was like—” Rue deepens her voice “—‘no, it has to mean more.’ And now we’re stuck making fucking PowerPoint presentations about something that doesn’t even fucking matter.”

“I don’t know, Rue, because hope doesn’t actually have feathers?”

“But how do we know?”

“I mean, I guess we don’t,” Lexi placates, rubbing her forehead. Rue’s at the point where she’s so locked into her own head that she doesn’t really hear what Lexi’s saying, and all Lexi can do is listen and try to follow along. And normally, she would, but she’s kind of preoccupied and really just wants to get this assignment over with. “But don’t you think we should just stick to what the rubric’s asking and not try to subvert the entire history of American poetry?”

Rue stops pacing, eyes sliding over to Lexi. “I fucking hate presentations,” she groans, but settles on the couch, taking the laptop out of Lexi’s hands to write her own interpretation of their assigned poem. “You going to McKay’s on Friday?”

“Um, no. Why?”

“He’s throwing a party.” Rue looks up from the screen. “Tucker didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Lexi sighs. She knew her hesitancy to take things further was going to somehow manifest into something like this. She meant what she told Cassie; Tucker’s sweet, but he’s also a teenage boy that looks up to guys like Nate Jacobs. “I think he’s mad that I won’t make-out with him.”

“Why won’t you?”

Lexi frowns at Rue, surprised. “What happened to ‘you can say no’?”

Rue shrugs. “You can—actually, you _should_. Tucker’s a fucking dick for trying to rush you. But you’re obviously into him, Lexi; you spend all your fucking time together. It just seems logical that you would want to like, make-out with him or something.”

“I do want to. I just…I’ve never done it before. I guess I don’t want to embarrass myself.” But even as she says it, she knows it's not the whole truth. She doesn't even know the whole truth, but she guesses she probably inherited some sort of deep-rooted intimacy issue, and because Tucker’s her first ever boyfriend, she's only now having to deal with it. 

“Oh,” Rue nods. “I got you.”

She goes back to typing and then turns the laptop to face Lexi. The last thing Lexi’s expecting to see when she looks down at it are two naked people on top of each other on a bed, their tongues visibly moving in each other’s mouths. She sucks in a breath and slams her eyes shut.

“Oh my God. Rue!”

“What?” Rue laughs. 

“That’s porn!”

“It’s education. Come on, how else are you going to learn?”

Lexi blindly reaches for the laptop, exaggerating a little just to hear Rue laugh again, and slaps the lid shut. “I’ll figure something out.”

\---

Tucker’s at her door the next morning; he kisses her cheek and starts in on his usual recapping of football practice and whatever “the boys” got up to after he’d texted Lexi last. She doesn’t mind listening to him, which probably has a lot to do with spending years listening to Rue ramble nonstop about the most specific things whenever she’s manic, but today, she gives him a time limit.

As soon as they turn into the school parking lot, Lexi breathes in and prepares herself for rejection just in case. “Tucker?”

“Yeah? Hold up.” He bends down to tie his shoe, which helps because it means she won't have to see his face if this doesn't end well.

“Why didn’t you tell me about McKay’s party?”

“Uh…” He finishes looping his laces together, and then stands up and looks down at her a little confused. “Because I didn’t think it was something you’d want to go to. I always see Cassie at them and figured if you did want to go, you’d have gone with her.”

"Is that the only reason?" 

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “But hey, if you want to go, Nate’s gonna drive me there after the game; I could ask him to pick you up on the way.”

“Are you okay with that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” He grins at her so easily and openly that Lexi feels kind of stupid for thinking it was about anything else. She’s about to keep walking, but he puts his hand on her arm.

“Wait, wait,” he says, and Lexi turns to look up at him, raising her eyebrows. He fiddles with his backpack straps and puffs his cheeks. “I don’t want to wait until you have to drag it out of me like this whole party thing, so…Lexi Howard—” he shoots her a charming, slightly nervous smile “—you wanna go to the Freshman Formal with me?”

Everything sort of melts inside Lexi. Some part of her always knew that he was going to ask her, but that part feels very small next to the elated fourteen-year-old girl that’s been invisible her entire life.

“I would love to.”


End file.
